By Oriole Newgass

Recently I have been spending more time writing and researching in the south west of England - this will explain why my current Favourite Tipples are a slightly odd lot: nothing of the cutting-edge, social media, smartphone apps-like stuff, I'm afraid - just those that are currently working well for me.

• Lawyer News Daily: This keeps me in touch with the legal world, when I worked in law firms in London The Lawyer was required reading and it’s a connection I like to maintain. It gives all the news and gossip, the inside information and rumours, the negotiations and mergers from the London and provincial law scene. There seems to be a tendency for it to get a bit more serious these days – I miss the “most read” section which always had the best gossip and best comments – but the news and briefings continue to be excellent. Extremely useful site for all things legal.
  
  
• Royal Horticultural Society: Great email newsletters RHS News and RHS Wild About Gardens, and access to a really comprehensive website for everything from advice on planting, pruning and pests; good coverage of questions like peat or peat-free – which is the most ethical?; and a good plant identification resource. Sound recommendations for planting to encourage wildlife, bees and butterflies, and one-to-one problem-solving advice from experts. Why so keen on the RHS? I love to grow things!
  
  
• International Jewish Cemetery Project: This is a project run by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Studies, and a marvellous resource for researching traces of former Jewish communities all over the world. This has been a particular interest since the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when I lived in Eastern Europe and photographed a great many of the then entirely "unvisited tombs" in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Now living in the south west of England I am discovering much more about the former Jewish communities in Devon and Cornwall from this very reliable site, as well as keeping an eye on the changes and restorations taking place in Eastern Europe.
  
  
• AbeBooks.co.uk: AbeBooks has been on my "favourites" list for years now, long before Amazon went all-out for world domination. For second-hand books, odd books, old books, rare-ish books and books published abroad, it is still the best. The site has never let me down and never presumes to tell me what it thinks I ought to like, in that irritating Amazon fashion. It just finds and supplies the books I know I want - and almost always at prices that beat the opposition.
  
  
• Google Alerts: I know that other tipplers have nominated this one, it is an incredibly useful tool when working on something topical and likely to appear in a wide spectrum of news publications. It saves continual monitoring of the same sources on the off-chance there might be something new – Google does it all for you. I particularly like the flexibility, enabling me to set up a new Alert when required or take one down as soon as it is no longer needed. I have some long-term Alerts: subjects which I will always want to monitor, and some quite short-term ones for specific projects. As a general rule I don’t have a very high opinion of Google but the Alerts are superb and - as far as I know - unique.

After two decades in commercial libraries and information centres - from pharmaceutical research through information providers, merchant banks and law firms - Oriole Newgass set up Legal-IM, an independent consultancy in the south west of England, seven years ago. She has been involved with CILIP for a long time, particularly as Chair of their Commercial Legal & Scientific Information Group (CLSIG) and is currently Deputy Editor of the CLSIG Journal. Oriole can be contacted via LinkedIn.

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FreePint Features offers the latest commentary on trends, issues and opportunities in the information world, as well as examples of how organisations use FreePint resources to raise the value of information.

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• The Intel on ALM Legal Intelligence
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• Compliance Series, Subscription Content
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• Product Review of ALM Legal Intelligence: Executive Summary
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